Word: kerns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Desert Song, taught him the basics of writing for the musical stage. Sigmund Romberg, confining his highest praise to the words "It fits, it fits." taught him the virtues of a 16-hour work day.* Jerome Kern, who gave him the tall captain's table on which Hammerstein thereafter wrote standing up, taught him-ordered him, rather-never to use the word Cupid in a lyric. After hearing Kern's next melody for Show Boat (the music came first with Jerome Kern; words were filled in later), Hammerstein fired back lyrics that began...
...When Kern recovered, he was given an alternative...
From his home in Bronxville, N.Y., Jerome Kern would call up Hammerstein in Great Neck, L.I.; then he would set the phone on his piano and bang away at the keyboard while the greatest American operetta grew along the wires, as Oscar picked out the pure Kern from the blip-blap-bleep of the Bell System, and made preliminary notes for such Showboat masterpieces...
...survivors are headed by Little Mary Sunshine, a boffo operetta satirizing the Kern-y, Friml-ous past; The Balcony, Jean Genet's world view through a brothel window; The Connection, a pad full of hipsters seeking to prove that the opiate of the people is heroin after all; and a skillfully acted double bill of disenchantment: Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in which a beaten and lonely ex-writer poignantly and often amusingly grovels in his past, paired with Edward Albee's Zoo Story, in which a desperately lonely beatnik attempts the hopeless, tragicomic...
...Office Glitter. Tibbett always had a faint distrust of grand opera's grand pretensions. The music of Jerome Kern, he used to argue, was as good as many an imported classic. When critics roasted him for including Old Man River in a program of operatic excerpts, he responded by including it in almost every recital he sang after that. He also laced his concert programs with popular tranquilizers-De Glory Road, Gwine to Hebb'n, At Dawning. Tibbett probably made more money than his contemporaries because he was the first to exploit the box-office glitter...